The Come Up Show (Re)Presents – Ab-Soul

You might have noticed there was no new episode last week. We’re launching Season 3 of The Come Up Show podcast with brand new episodes, guests, and making a few tweaks to make the podcast even better.

But in the meantime, we’re going to be sharing classic interviews on The Come Up Show with you all. And you know they are true to The Come Up Show because we interviewed them on the come up and their career has taken off since then.

Today’s guest is black-lipped-bastard. Ab-Soul aka SOULO HOE. This was his first time in Toronto during the “Road To Paid Dues” tour stop in Toronto. Volume 3 of the Long Term Mentality mixtape came out, and at the time he tells us why he doesn’t aspire to be on XXL’s Freshman list, why he started questioning religion once he started reading on Malcolm X, and the power of our words.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation with Ab-Soul, you can click here to see the original story. Play the podcast to hear more!

Don’t look forward to being a “freshman”

Ab-Soul: I’m not looking forward to being on the Freshman list, if that’s what happens, then I’ll take my reward with a smile and keep going. But we can’t look forward to being a freshman, you have to look forward to being a singer. You don’t go to college like “I can’t wait to be a freshman”, nah you look at it like, “ I can’t wait to graduate.”

Be as ambiguous as possible

Ab-Soul: The Christian church was the only view that I had on religion. Once I got exposed and started reading other literature, I got exposed to different ideas and concepts of religion. Through that, I learned to be open to ideas and be as ambiguous as possible.

The meaning of words

Ab-Soul: I was looking at the movie Jay-Z did for Oprah, The Masterclass, and I just thought about how we can say a lot of things but it depends on how you say it, or who you say it to, on what effect it would have. We give these words the effect they have on people and we got to keep that in mind.